170: What if you didn't sleep for 120 hours?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. I didn't know what was happening, and I felt like I couldn't move. It felt like the earth had stopped rotating, like I was trapped in this moment of just complete, all-encompassing fear. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein.

You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 170. What if you didn't sleep for 120 hours?

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My early life was highly idyllic.

I'm an only child. I grew up across the yard from two of my cousins and within walking distance of my grandmother. My mother grew up with five siblings and she wanted for her child the opposite of that. She wanted me to have all of the attention and all of the opportunity and all of the experiences that she didn't get until she was older.

My parents love to read and to explore and to travel. And I think that they really wanted me to have a very hungry mind. They wanted me to be happy, obviously, but they wanted me to be a person with perspective, a person who is unafraid to step out of her comfort zone and explore the world. And they did everything they could to provide me with those opportunities.

I've always been very extroverted. I've always had a lot of friends and my house was the house that everyone came to. There was always an open door. My parents weren't strict. And I think that being an only child helped me to have like an honest and friendship like relationship with them. They really just like gave me every chance to become like a very well rounded human.

It gave me confidence that far exceeds my looks and abilities. It gave me a gregariousness that's helped me to form friendships wherever I go and form relationships and to be unafraid of the unfamiliar.

There wasn't a height that was too great for me to summit because of confidence. I'm not a genius at all, but I thought I could do anything. And the result of that is I had this charmed life. The first time I left the country, I was 11 years old. By the time I was entering my teenage years, I was chomping at the bit to see the world.

When I was 15, that's the first time I went on this water sports trip to Italy and Greece for three weeks. I was with a bunch of other 15-year-olds, and I had such a good time. I came back, and I just knew I was hooked. I would get restless the more time I spent in Tennessee. I wanted to go more places and see more things.

The fall semester of my junior year, my parents sent me as far away as you can physically send another person because that's where I wanted to go. And I went and lived for seven months in New Zealand. Just kind of living in a different environment was nothing I had experienced before. It was all very unfamiliar things.

I felt really insecure for most of the time I was there because I was this kind of outsider. And I was also 16. I didn't know how to navigate emotions well. I didn't have a lot of perspective. I had been very sheltered, but in a way it also helped me to adapt to those situations, which has served me in life ever since. Over those seven months, I feel like I became a different person.

And I ended my term in New Zealand more restless and hungry to experience the world than ever before. I got back from New Zealand and finished out the second semester of my junior year. And once again, summer was approaching and I was so excited to try something new and go somewhere new.

So I went back to the company that I had gone to Italy and Greece with, and they had all of these trips and they were kind of expanding the trips that they were making. The one that stuck out the most to me was this trip to Tanzania and Kenya.

It was like a tourism trip that had like some service elements. We would build a soccer field at a school and help at a nature preserve. And the opportunity to go to Africa was so exciting to me. Having gone to New Zealand and experienced seven months of New Zealand, I thought I could do anything. I could go anywhere and it would be great and I would be fine. I was completely fearless.

The lead up to Africa was a lot more complicated. I had to get a bunch of shots and it required a lot more preparation. And when you're preparing to go to somewhere that has a relevant presence of malaria, you have to start taking the malaria medication before you go so that it's in your system by the time you arrive.

So I started taking the malaria medication the day before I left. The first night of that trip was actually spent on the plane. I hardly ever sleep on planes. I definitely didn't sleep on my way to New Zealand. So I spent the plane ride making friends with these kids.

At that point, I was like ignorant enough to consider Africa to be one entity and not 54 distinctive self-contained countries. But my impression was based on infomercials. It was like this exotic land that's defining characteristic was a lack of infrastructure. And I was probably led by some white savior complex as well.

And so by the time we landed in Dar es Salaam, we walked out of the airport, went into the city. And my first day in Dar es Salaam did a lot to dispel what I initially thought Tanzania was going to be like.

It's a big city. It has business people and restaurants and theaters and high rises and tourism. There's palm trees everywhere. There's people everywhere. I mean, it's like a bustling city. So I was kind of wide eyed, gaping at everything for a while, I think. And I actually remember being pretty embarrassed that I expected anything different.

But I think that that's the great thing about exploration and travel is that you're giving yourself a chance to be proved wrong. And once you accept it with humility, your mind opens more and more. We arrived in Tanzania in early afternoon.

Our campground was well out of the city. And so we kind of only had like a little bit to look around. And then we piled back up into the trucks and started driving out of the city to get to our campground by the time it got dark. We put all the tents together in kind of a semicircle. And then our guides, we had two guides that were also American, Kate and Adam. And there were like 16 to 18, 17 year olds.

Everyone sat down at these picnic tables to eat. And I remember everyone was like quite exhausted. Before I left for Tanzania, probably a few months before I left, I had started to experience stomach pain whenever I ate. And I went to a whole bunch of doctor's appointments and they suspected that it was a problem with my gallbladder, that my gallbladder was diseased.

So while I still experienced quite a bit of pain whenever I ate, I wasn't going to let anything stop me from going on this trip. And so I convinced my parents and all the doctors that I was fine enough to go. And I was. A gallbladder situation is not life-threatening or anything. Because of this gallbladder issue, I was eating a lot less and less often because I experienced pain when I ate.

So the first night we were there and beyond, I was eating very little, which I think contributed to my growing exhaustion. As soon as we were done eating, everyone was like ready for bed. And so we all got into our tents and I was sharing a tent with another girl and everyone went to sleep.

I just kind of lay there kind of tossing and turning for a long time. And I would reach kind of a very calm state where I thought I would go to sleep and then I just wouldn't sleep.

I was incredibly tired, but it didn't strike me that anything was wrong because of jet lag and just kind of unfamiliar conditions. I mean, it's hot. There are all new insects to hear. It was just a very unfamiliar situation. And so I attributed my sleeplessness to that. And by the time dawn rolled around, I had been awake all night.

So we have breakfast and then we depart to drive further up the coast to this school we were going to. Kids and everyone waved to us as we went by and we made a big deal about waving back. It was just a lot of fun. Throughout the day, I was so exhausted that I would try and lay down, but all the roads were very bumpy. There was a lot of noises and so I still couldn't sleep.

By the time that we finished that drive, I had been awake for probably 60 something hours. And I was experiencing the symptoms of extreme fatigue. I was kind of listless. I wasn't being very articulate.

By the time we were eating dinner, I was exhausted. And I could feel how tired I was in every part of my body.

Everyone kind of lays down and goes to sleep immediately. And I just remember thinking about how much pain I was in. I had a raging headache by this point and everything hurt. My neck, my back, my joints, my eyes, especially, and my stomach. I had a severe pain in my stomach.

My face was pressed into the corner of the tent because it was so crowded. And I felt like I couldn't breathe, like I couldn't get any air. And then it kind of felt like time stood still. I all of a sudden got very cold and

And I remember my face being pressed into the corner of the tent and just trying to inhale to get like air into my lungs and not being able to. So I just breathe faster and faster with this like rising sense of urgency and stress. I didn't know what was happening and I felt like I couldn't move.

It felt like the earth had stopped rotating. Like I was trapped in this moment of just complete, all-encompassing fear. It felt like this outside sense of terror had entered my mind and there was no rational thought that could compete with it. And then I started to believe it, this absolute certainty that I was going to die. I actually heard someone crying.

before I realized it was me.

It was kind of like this out-of-body experience where I could hear the sound of someone crying, but I didn't feel myself crying. And then I kind of came back to my own body a little bit, and I started experiencing sensation again. I could feel my chest heaving. I could feel myself shaking. I could feel myself gripping my hair, and I could feel myself weeping.

By this time, the girl next to me had woken up and like tried to like shake me and like talk to me, but I wasn't responding really to anything. And so she went and woke up our two guides. I'm curled up hyperventilating in this tent and the guides come out and they're trying to talk to me like through the mouth of the tent, but I'm pretty much unresponsive. And so Adam like takes my ankles and pulls me out of the tent.

And I remember telling them, I think I'm having a heart attack. I was pulling on my hair and just shouting about how I was about to die. I was certain I knew that I was about to die. During all of this, the two guides were talking to each other. They already knew that I had had these gallbladder issues. And so they were sure that I was having some type of gallbladder issue. And so they ended up calling a cab.

I was with Adam and then there was the cab driver and then one of the truck drivers that served as an interpreter. And we were driving down this like bumpy road in the middle of the night. And we finally arrived at a ferry. But while we were in line to get on the ferry, I opened the door of the car and stepped outside and just started vomiting until there was absolutely nothing left. And then I got back in the ferry and

My hands were shaking. And Adam said, this is a problem with your gallbladder. Something's wrong with your gallbladder. And it turns out we were going to Zanzibar because the closest medical facility to where our campsite was, was actually on Zanzibar. Once we arrived there, we got off the ferry and then they drove me to an emergency room.

We're going down this kind of like dim hallway. And I remember there being blood on the floor and I started to freak out again. We get into this triage area. There was like a doctor and nurses that were coming and taking my temperature and all of that. And then Adam said, I'm going to call your parents, but I'm going to step outside. So I have reception.

All of these people are kind of talking over me, not in English, so I couldn't really understand what they were saying at all. And a nurse came up to me and said, we're going to take out your gallbladder. I lost my mind. I started thrashing around, shouting, crying, and they were like trying to hold me down. I think I kicked someone at some point.

I was just fighting as hard as I could because I did not want to have surgery. I had no idea what was going on. And I was so unbelievably tired that I could barely form a coherent thought. So Adam comes back and he's like, what's going on here? And I tell him that they want to take out my gallbladder. They want to perform surgery on me.

And he's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're not doing that. And so he hands me the phone and then my parents are on the other end of the phone. They were like trying to calm me down. They were like, it's going to be okay. We're going to call your doctor and try and figure this out. I remember mentioning to them that I hadn't slept. And my mom was like, you're jet lagged. You're in a foreign place. Your gallbladder is acting up. You're in so much pain. Of course you haven't slept.

Her rationality and her calm demeanor helped to calm me down. I remember they kind of took my blood pressure and they ended up giving me like an anti-inflammatory painkiller and some stomach medication, but ultimately just letting me go.

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And the next, something goes wrong. But with ADT's 24-7 professional monitoring, you still feel safe. Because when every second counts, count on ADT. Visit ADT.com today. We got back in the car and got back on the ferry and got back to the mainland and started driving back to the campsite. And by this point, I hadn't slept for 72 hours.

The CIA classifies like sleep deprivation of more than 72 hours is like an enhanced interrogation technique. It's used as a form of torture because it completely interrupts your biological functioning. Like your brain has to rest. It has to in order to function properly.

It's an incredibly disorienting, scary, painful thing to be awake for that long. And especially to be awake for that long and not know why. I think I was trying to contend with that on our ride back. And by the time we arrived back at this campsite, it's like morning. Everyone greets me when I get out of the car. And, you know, I calmed down by that point.

So we loaded in the trucks and we drove to this like small local school. By this point, I felt like I was like walking around underwater. I felt like I was doing everything incredibly slowly. I was probably doing the slowest manual labor of all time. And my eyes just burned.

I didn't really have the energy to be as stressed out as I was before. All of that adrenaline had left. And so I was more of a shell walking around. I started to experience micro-sleeps.

It's essentially where your brain just shuts down for a few seconds at a time. It's very disorienting. And I would just be staring. And then it was like this weird like jolt. And I at first I didn't even couldn't even tell what was happening. And then my rational brain was like, of course, of course, this is happening.

We get back to camp and I remember someone saying my name and I looked down and my legs were covered in ants that were biting me. And I didn't feel it at all. I kind of like jumped in the water to get all the ants off. And then I got back out of the pool and I had these like little ant bites all over my legs. I didn't even feel it.

needless to say, they gave me my own tent. And so they gave me a tent that was right next to where the guides were sleeping so they could hear if I needed anything. I was so wired by whatever energy I sourced from somewhere in my body that I couldn't sit still. So I got up, I left the tent and I just started pacing back

At that point, I would see things like kind of dance in and out of the corner of my vision. I also heard kind of like echoey voices behind me that weren't saying anything, but I kept turning around thinking I heard someone and no one was there. And so I paced back and forth until I was too exhausted to continue. And then I went back to my tent and I sat there.

And I began obsessively taking pictures of just the corner of the tent because the camera showed what time it was every time you took a picture. It was so eerie to go back later and see like a hundred pictures of the same thing, this kind of darkened tent with the flash of my camera. In the middle of all of that, I heard like a voice beside me

And I looked over and my cousin Katie was sitting beside me in the tent. And I think she was talking about like one of her friends or something, but we had a conversation. And I remember being like kind of comforted that she was there.

And then eventually the guide, Kate, who had woken up hearing me talking in my tent, came over, opened the fold of my tent a little bit. And when I saw her face, I realized that Katie wasn't actually there. And I just started crying again. They called my parents again. And I got on the phone with my parents and we all agreed it was time for me to go home.

I hadn't slept in four days and the symptoms and physical effects were undeniable. I was talking to air.

The sun came back up and I told them that I was going to go home, that I was really sick. They were so nice and like so sorry to see me go and like comforting. And I was actually like pretty chilled out because I was barely a person. And I kind of low key accepted that I was never going to sleep again. And I didn't even have the energy to be upset about it.

By the fifth day, I had been up for 120 hours. They don't even study sleep deprivation in people for that long. They did like a study of astronauts, but they only went for 72 hours. You're not supposed to stay up that long. It's incredibly harmful to your brain. The morning came, people packed up my stuff for me. I didn't really feel any emotion about leaving.

And on the plane from Dar es Salaam to Dubai, I was able to successfully sleep for one hour. I got on the plane to go to New York and I slept for an hour of that plane ride. My parents met me in New York and we went to a hotel. I was able to get to the room, take a shower and then crawl into bed. And I slept for six hours there.

My parents said that while I was asleep, I like sat up and started talking to people and my eyes were open and everything. And my mom lost her mind. She was so afraid of what was happening. But my dad like slept walk as a kid. So he was like, she's still asleep.

We drove back to Tennessee and I was able to sleep more in the car. And so by the time we got back to Tennessee, I felt like a normal person again, like my own self. I could think and understand and respond. I just wanted to take some time to rest. I had lost nearly 10 pounds in six days.

Obviously, my parents wanted me to get in to see a doctor to figure out what exactly had gone on. So we went to a doctor and he informed us that my case was incredibly extreme. But this malaria medication that I had been taking actually causes acute insomnia as a side effect in quite a lot of people.

So after my fourth night without sleep, I stopped taking the malaria medication and I stopped taking it because I couldn't take any pills without any food. It would just make me violently ill. So it was reassuring to have a cause.

But I was actually like a little bit angry that it seemed like such an obvious answer and like my trip had to be cut short and all of this stuff had happened when something as simple as stopping the use of that medication would have provided me with the relief that I needed.

I ended up undergoing tests to see if my gallbladder was diseased. And they ultimately, in the first two weeks of my senior year, they took out my gallbladder and it was diseased and was the source of all of my stomach pain. So they took it out and I've been fine ever since.

Often in my life, when I don't know how to digest something, I'll turn it into a joke. And pretty much immediately after I came back, it turned to this story. I would see my friends again and be like, this is the craziest thing happened to me. And I kind of closed the book on that summer. And I always considered it an isolated incident. I thought it was an anecdote.

So by the end of my senior year, I turned back to that same company and they had this new trip that they were offering to go to China. I wasn't super stressed about the prospect of leaving until we drove from Knoxville to Atlanta to the Atlanta airport. And I get on the plane and all of a sudden I had every feeling that I had when I was in that tent.

The chills, the hyperventilating. I started to cry. And this thought in my head that if I left, I was going to die. I felt like I was going insane. Like I had lost some grip on reality. And all of a sudden, I was back in that tent. I was in so much pain. And I was in so much fear. I said to myself, if I get off this plane, it'll stop.

So they let me off the plane and I called my mom to come back and get me. And I felt awful. First of all, I didn't know what this was. Like, what is this? Why is it happening? Like, why is what happened in Africa relevant again? I had slept. Like, I didn't have gallbladder problems. I wasn't in pain. Why am I all of a sudden having this freak out?

I got back in the car and I just felt like I had failed in some way. Like I had all of these like huge expectations internally of being completely fearless and not having anything get in my way. And like at the first sign of distress, I bolted. I kind of like spent the rest of that summer just trying to forget what happened and trying to forget about China.

And I did a pretty good job of it until I was getting ready to go to college. And these feelings came back. And I couldn't attribute it to anything. My parents took me to college. My mom gave me a Xanax and it worked. And after I slept that first night in my new dorm, I was fine.

My first year of college was a blur of activity, made all these friends, had so much fun. So by the summer I was 19, I had a group of friends from school that were moving to Washington, D.C. for the summer. And the same thing happened when I arrived in D.C. And this time I just drank a ton of alcohol.

until I was able to sleep. And after I slept, I was okay. So the middle of that summer, my dad called me to tell me that my parents were getting a divorce. And that really rocked the foundation of my life. And my way of coping with it was just to rail against everything and

I'm insanely privileged anyway, but part of that privilege was like that I could be sheltered enough from some of the tougher experiences that people can go through to where like when it was time for me to cope with that, I didn't really know how. And so I just shut out any suggestion that wasn't drinking with my friends.

I have all this privilege in life and I always understood it to be my moral obligation to do something with it, to make some positive change.

I never wanted China to happen again. I never wanted to make any decision based off of fear. And that internal expectation made it so like if I were to choose to not go anywhere, it felt like I was failing because I wanted to see the world and I didn't want anything to stop me from that goal and that dream.

I made the decision to study abroad again in Dundee, Scotland. And this time, those attacks hit me a lot harder. They were more sustained. I didn't really know why.

While I was there, I ended up going to a psychiatrist for the first time to try and figure out what exactly was happening inside my brain. And so that psychiatrist was the first person to diagnose me with panic attacks.

Panic attacks are your sympathetic nervous system going into overdrive until your body is like filled with so much adrenaline that you have this like fight or flight reaction. All the symptoms I'd experienced, I can now look up in a book and see like a textbook description of what had occurred in that tent in Africa and what had occurred all those other times since then.

There's the physical symptoms, the chills, the sweating, nausea and vomiting, the hyperventilating, the shakiness. And there's this intense fear or belief that you're dying or going crazy.

That's always struck me as so odd that that could be listed as a symptom when the actual experience of it is so odd and foreign to like be a completely functioning normal person one minute and the next minute be certain that you're going to die and losing your grip with reality.

Just like with the malaria medication, I finally had an answer. And I didn't know why it had started happening. And I didn't have any plan for how to deal with it. But that what I had experienced had a name was quite comforting.

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I went to a variety of things.

therapists to try and treat these panic attacks over the years. And they prescribed me Xanax. They tried to work with me to help understand what triggered them. And I was pretty dismissive of the whole process. I kind of had this foolhardy notion that I could beat this myself, you know, mind over matter.

I graduated college. I ended up applying to graduate schools, and I wanted a graduate program that had a focus on human rights. I ended up choosing the University of Glasgow's Human Rights and International Politics graduate program.

As like my date of departure was approaching, I started to get more and more nervous. And I would get so anxious and nervous about the possibility of having a panic attack that I would give myself a panic attack. It was like this negative feedback loop that was taking place in my brain and was so difficult to stop.

In trying to prepare to leave, I went to a doctor and he put me on an SSRI. It's a class of antidepressants and antipsychotics that's very useful in treating anxiety disorders and panic attacks. After being prescribed that medicine, I started taking it and I was fine.

And then I think sometimes if you start taking medication and you start to feel better, you start to believe you don't need it anymore. But I didn't take it for about a month. And then I tried taking it again. And when I tried taking it again, it caused me to have panic attacks. And they were much more severe than any that I had experienced before. I started to have flashbacks during my...

My panic attacks of my face pressed into the corner of that tent and I could feel it. Everything quickly fell apart.

I couldn't work. When I did work, I was a nervous wreck. It eventually kind of all came to a head one night where I had a panic attack so bad that I asked my roommate to take me to the emergency room because I thought I would be so far gone. I would go so insane, I guess, was my belief that I would kill myself. Eventually, I ended up leaving for Scotland and

And I did it using a boatload of Xanax and these kind of tamer antipsychotics. And I thought if I could just get through, it was a one year program. If I could just get through this year, I'll deal with everything else after. I moved into this kind of small flat and it was four months of hell.

I would go to class. I would try and complete the readings and assignments, but I was always on this precipice of dissolving into a panic attack. I wanted to go home for Christmas, so I went home for Christmas.

Christmas came and went. And then I remember it so vividly. It was December 29th, 2015. I went to a Mexican restaurant with my friend. And there was this child in this restaurant that was crying. And every time the child would make a noise, I would feel this spike of stress. I said, I really need to go home.

And so she took me home and then it started. I had a panic attack and it just didn't end. It was one after another, after another. I just started crying and shivering. I got up and I was sick. I came back. I laid in bed. There were times when I had to put my face against the mattress and just scream like I was in a horror movie.

I was filled with this energy, this horrible restlessness that wouldn't leave. I would curl up and pull on my hair and just weep. And how do you explain it? Something as innocuous as the sun setting, some thought as simple as what if I can't sleep or

can spur this physical reaction that's completely outside of your control. That's the part I've had the most difficulty with is giving up control. I can't remember how many doctors I've seen, but there's been like a consensus that I have PTSD induced panic disorder.

And all of it roots back to this seemingly inconsequential five day long experience that broke my brain. And it just stripped away everything I was until I was some animal thing, just like this exposed nerve, like a bundle of sensations. Yeah.

I'm in the tent and my lungs feel like they're shrinking and I can't stop crying. And there's this like inescapable diminution of like all rationality. I'm dying. I'm dying. I've lost my mind. I'm going insane. It's that feeling that like nightmarish agonizing fear, even like the specification of the word panic doesn't really do it justice. Yeah.

You think that your body and its processes and its responses are going to be reliable. And then you completely lose your grip on what's real and what's not because of this chemical that is being unleashed inside your head. And everyone around you is fine.

You're safe. You're in a house. You're around people who are calm and sane and you are protozoan. You've regressed to this crude, feral beast that's shrinking from some threat that doesn't exist. You're walking around on a crashing plane and I'm 29 years old and I have been on that plane hundreds of times. I had to write down on a piece of paper times when I felt normal and

So when I was panicking, I could look at that piece of paper and think to myself, you have been normal before. There has been a time in your life where your brain wasn't like this. I had avoided it for so long, avoided fully dealing with the ramifications of Tanzania.

And I was so angry too. I was so mad because I've always associated post-traumatic stress with soldiers and people who have witnessed or experienced violence. Not like, hey, one time I stayed up too long. I was annoyed that this, like my brain had clung on to this experience and would not let go.

Even describing it feels like this lost cause because it's so isolating. You're alone inside your own brain. I spent a week in bed and once I got out of bed, it was only to go to therapy and I went to therapy every day. Then they put me on all of the medicine.

At one point, I woke up, I took two Xanax, I went back to sleep. I woke back up, took two more Xanax, went back to sleep. I woke back up, I took an antipsychotic and two more Xanax, ate something and then took an Ambien. And I did that every day. If you're keeping that schedule, you're a member of the undead. You're not even a person.

It was quickly established that I couldn't go back to school. I mean, I barely could leave my house. And that was the most painstaking, horrible decision to decide to defer school. Because to me, that was failure. I had let this process that I'd been so long contending with, I had let it win. It reigned supreme. That failure to me was crushing.

And the panic didn't stop. If I didn't keep up that regimen of pills, it didn't stop. I started experiencing this really bad stomach pain. And I went to the doctor. I had a scope done. And they told me that I had damaged my stomach lining from keeping up this regimen of medication and the occasional Ritz cracker. So I had to come off. In particular, I had to come off the Xanax.

As soon as it leaves your system, you're anxious again. And then you have to take another one. And then your tolerance goes up. And so I called Turkey Quit Xanax. And I went into probably a week and a half long withdrawal. I had been sweating so much from this withdrawal that it looked like I had taken a shower. And I was just sitting alone in the bathroom. And I just said to myself, I don't want to live anymore. I can't do this.

And immediately I was so angry. I told myself, give it another day. And then the next day I said, give it another day. And then it became give it another week. And I ultimately spent four months inside my house. I couldn't stand to be in a room with more than three people in it. I was, I had this terrible agoraphobia.

My therapist recommended that I get this. It's a blood test they can do. They can test your DNA against all of the different varieties of SSRIs to see which was most compatible. So I got that test done and then I figured out that everything I tried to take, all of these SSRIs were incompatible. They were never going to work.

And so then my therapist and my doctor coordinated and I got on an SSRI that would work. And I began to heal. My depression started to dissipate and I kept going to therapy. I started going to work, which was manual labor, but it helped. I was outside every day. I just threw myself into this kind of simple work routine.

Eventually, I got to the point where I thought, you know, as long as I'm stuck in Tennessee, I want to do something that would be a credit to my future life. And so I ended up getting a job as a grant writer at a food bank there. And I worked until it was coming out this return to Scotland project.

Two practices really helped me. The first was my therapist recommended it. She said, don't say that you're going back. Say, if I go back, because it takes this pressure off, you're still in control. And so I started saying, if I go back to Scotland, and I said it until I boarded the plane, if I go back. And the second thing I did was I started to disassociate myself from the future.

My reasoning was, okay, if you are the same person in a month, then why don't you let your future self handle the stress that you're contending with that day? Make it your responsibility to get through the next hour and then the next hour. I started to think, there's going to be a day when I have to get on a plane and go back to Scotland. But the me that exists that day, that's her problem.

As soon as I came to the understanding that the me that exists now is not the same me that will exist in a day or in a week, I stopped shouldering the responsibility of my future self, letting what felt like someone else take responsibility for what was going to happen in the future. I am going to make it my responsibility to live through the next hour.

It's helped me ever since. It took eight years for it to finally come to this, the end of this road. And essentially my brain just said, no, we, we got to deal with this. You can't keep going. This is, this is too much. I had these very high internal expectations of myself and

And if I hadn't considered myself so impervious to treatment and help, I probably would have had a much easier time. If I hadn't convinced myself that I was capable of overcoming these biological circumstances, I don't know where I got it from either. It's so bullshit. It's like...

I just thought that like I was going to be this like hero in my own story. And life is so much more complicated than that. That's such an oversimplification made by a very sick individual. Eventually, the day came, I took a leave from work and I got on the plane and I went to Scotland. Panic wasn't a part of it anymore.

I felt the urge to panic when I got there, but I just kind of used all the tools I had available to me and it went away. I performed this like original research to finish my dissertation and I graduated and I went back to Scotland for my graduation ceremony. And unbelievably, panic is not a part of my life anymore. I will still have a panic attack every once in a while when I go to a new place.

But I deal with it. I take medicine and then it's over. And that's what I felt whenever I graduated this person who was sitting on the floor of a bathroom thinking nothing would ever be okay again. And then it was. And like, how amazing is that? Yeah.

Going back to Scotland and then going back to Scotland again to graduate were these like victories that I just carried around with me. And I would look back on them if I felt unsure. Yeah.

Once I was back in Tennessee, I worked at the food bank for another nine months-ish. And then I got a job at a refugee resettlement agency near Washington, D.C. And so I moved to Maryland and I have lived here ever since. And I've gone to South Africa for two weeks and had an amazing time.

I've just been working, working in the field I always wanted to work in. And it's very rewarding. I mean, the brain is a scary thing. It's meat with electricity. And then your own in your head, which is all that you know, that's what's fragile, is this

sense of reliability that your body will do what you tell it to do, that you will be in control of what you think and what you feel internally. And then when that gets taken away, it feels like you can't rely on anything at all. It's like, well, if I'm insane, if I'm going insane, if I think I'm going to die, then how can I rely on, you know, my nervous system to work, my digestive system to work?

It's like you can't trust anything. And that's what feels debilitating about it, I think. Yeah.

But I want to make this clear that there is absolutely 1000% no way that I could have gotten to where I am if I had not just had the luck or blessing to be surrounded with the people that I'm surrounded with. If I didn't have amazing parents and amazing family, amazing friends, amazing

Their support and their sympathy and their belief in me never wavered, even though they did not understand what was happening to me. And even though I didn't understand it, they never left. All of the years of panicking and then ultimately this breakdown just recalibrated the way that I think now.

So often traumatic things that happen to people are so incredibly isolating. And I know what that's like to feel like you're completely alone and everyone's fighting their own battle. And they've all been through a very unique set of experiences. Yeah.

approaching people without understanding has made me a more compassionate person and a more forgiving person, especially because it's been so difficult for me to explain what panic attacks are like, that if someone's trying to explain something they've gone through and I don't understand them, I can empathize with that. I can say, I don't have to understand.

I'm a much more humbled, appreciative person. I mean, if anything, it left me with this huge gratitude for everything that I had. Today's episode featured Emily Caldwell. You can find out more about Emily on Instagram at emilycaldwell589. That's at Emily C-A-L-D-W-E-L-L-5-8-9. ♪

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